Matt G. Watson

A few days ago Matt Ray, Zenoss Community Manager, emailed me to let me know that they had posted a beta release of a new ZenPack created by Andrea Consadari for monitoring the Asterisk PBX system using Zenoss. Matt had orignally told me awhile ago that he was working with an Asterisk solution provider that was not only creating a ZenPack to monitor your Asterisk installation, but that they were even going to give you the ability to send alerts through a community-provided Asterisk server. Unfortunately whomever that Asterisk solution provider was appears to have dropped off the map. Andrea Consadari has stepped up to the plate now to at least provide the monitoring ZenPack, read to find out what it can do for you! (more…)

Synopsis

This HowTo will guide you through the process of installing and configuring AstManProxy.  AstManProxy is a proxy server for Asterisk’s Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI).  The reason we want to use a proxy server infront of AMI is that AMI was not really designed to handle alot of simultanous connections and can cause extreme performance problems on the PBX.  A proxy server like AstManProxy can help this problem by acting as a hub for all of those connections and aggregating them into a single connection to AMI.  Using a proxy server also allows us to have a little more control over the input and output formats.  Asterisk uses a rather unique protocol for AMI, one which some developers find rather difficult to interface with.  AstManProxy can help by allowing you to interface using a REST/XML-RPC like interface, as well as getting plain text or XML responses.  Something that developers would much rather deal with. AstManProxy also has an ‘autofilter’ function which also helps developers interface by automatically filtering out un-wanted messages from Asterisk. (more…)

Synopsis

This HowTo is a guide on using Asterisk’s AlarmReceiver() application to make Asterisk act as an Ademco Contact ID alarm monitoring station. In short this application is capable of receiving calls from your alarm panel every time an event occurs on your system. This is essentially a complete home grown self-monitored alarm setup.

I should mention upfront that this application is not approved by the Underwriter’s Laboratory and as such, any insurance benefits you have from having an alarm system will probably be null and void with your insurance company if you go down this path. Personally, I think alarm systems in homes that do not utilize cellular connections are useless anyways. Landlines are too easy to disconnect on most homes… rendering the alarm monitoring useless.

Additionally, this guide assumes that your system is already programmed for monitored and that you just want to interface it with Asterisk. (more…)

Synopsis

So you’ve setup a VoIP phone system, but now you want to setup QoS on your router to prioritize your VoIP packets. This is imperative if you intend on running VoIP over any kind of WAN links like I do. Call quality might suffer otherwise - especially when that staff member decides he wants to donwload that 300mb service pack at work instead of using his own connection at home. I’ll show you here how you can solve this problem by using QoS on your Vyatta router.

My network looks something like this:

As you can see, I have 5 independent sites, the left side being my datacenter, and the right being individual sites where are staff work out of. Each site on the right has a Vyatta VC4 router running as its gateway and each of these sites are running Aastra IP phones which connect to our Asterisk PBX server running in the data center.

Anyways… onto the nitty gritty. Click the article title or the read more link below to read on.

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